Did you see Tim Kreider’s straight-shooting entry in the NY Times’ Anxiety series, “You Are Going to Die”? Kreider exposes a few of the predominant illusions that we embrace as a culture/species when it comes to dying, and while none of it may exactly be breaking news (or a laugh riot), his candor is deeply refreshing. It should come as no surprise that our hardwiring for control informs both of the top entries on the list: 1. the necessity to conceive of our life as a self-propelled narrative of progress (law) and 2. the absurd but no less widespread fallacy…
Inner Police and the Message of Grace to/with/for Children
Bravo to The NY Times for including Mark Galli’s wonderful and irenic “Focus on Grace, Not Control” in their new Room for Debate on the question “With Children, When Does Religion Go Too Far?” It’s a clear, brief and even exciting reminder of what Christianity has to offer to men and women–children and parents–who are living under the burden of control, whether it be in its religious or non-religious form, namely, the exact opposite of what most people perceive/experience it as offering (for good reason, as the comments depressingly bear out). It’s a little ironic that Galli–whose byline might suggest…
Is Contemporary Literature Post-Christian?
An essay in last week’s NYTimes written by Paul Elie grabbed my attention, prodded me in the gut, and provoked some mixed reactions on my behalf. Written with a sensitivity to the oft-referenced ‘post-Christian society,’ Elie surmises that contemporary American fiction lacks the believer: “In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.”
His argument and epistolatory tone largely stem from an understanding that a large swath of American literature has been overtly rooted in…
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Another Year Ends: Evangelical Decline, more Les Mis, Tebow Absurdity, Anxious Parents, The Hobbit, Apatow in Crisis, Millenial Affirmations and A Muppet Family Christmas
1. An uncommonly insightful piece by John Dickerson appeared in The NY Times about “The Decline of Evangelical America.” Writing as an evangelical himself, Dickerson recites some jarring statistics before launching into a sympathetic and genuinely hopeful conclusion, ht SZ:
In 2007, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, in a survey of 1,300 college professors, found that 3 percent held “unfavorable feelings” toward Jews, 22 percent toward Muslims and 53 percent toward evangelical Christians…
The core evangelical belief is that love and forgiveness are freely available to all who trust in Jesus Christ. This is the “good news” from which the…
“And Death’s Dark Shadow Put to Flight…” A Post for Newtown, Connecticut
It goes without saying that our prayers and hearts have been with Sandy Hook Elementary and the Newtown community since last week. On this side of our Sunday services, “Lord have mercy” is pretty much all I have left to say in my spiritually and emotionally exhausted state, and I don’t think I’m alone when I say that.
For those of us who are still struggling to maintain composure in light of tragedy, or for those exhausted from the 24 hour media coverage, or for those wrestling with the relationship between a good God and an evil…
“My Emails Send So Slowly From Cannes!” – Social Media and the Art of Humblebragging
The New York Times last week ran an so-real-it-hurts article on “Humblebragging“, examining how self-aggrandizing ‘modesty’ has worked its way into social media. With hilarious examples like the misfortunes of using the Internet in Cannes or complaining about how much men ‘hit on me when I’m in sweatpants’, the piece is almost a textbook on how to humblebrag yourself, ht TB:
SOMETIMES when I crave a powerful dose of humility — the kind of humility that can come only from fully apprehending the lot of those less fortunate than me — I turn my attention to the plight of the former…
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Another Week Ends: Exceptional Children, Holiness Holes, AA Slogans, Reformation Sincerity, Online Niceness, Grateful Dead, Aimee Mann and Seinfeld-ized Game of Thrones
1. An encouraging number of signs of life in the bibliosphere this week. First, over at The New Statesman, much to my surprise (and much to his credit), renowned atheist Alain de Botton selected Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense as his favorite book of the year. For a profound little excerpt from the book, go here. Can’t wait for it to come out in the States. Second, there’s the arresting depth of understanding and engagement in From Exile, Grow Man’s review of PZ’s Grace in Practice. Probably the most honest review I’ve…
Worried About Worrying (When You’re Not Supposed to Be)
A beautiful, honest, and incredibly sympathetic reflection on the relationship between anxiety, control, and circumstance appeared in The NY Times last week, as part of their (and now our!) ongoing series about Anxiety, the appropriately titled “The Snake in the Garden”. It’s hard to write a hopeful piece about what are essentially self-defeating internal processes, but that’s exactly what Pico Iyer has pulled off here. The final paragraph is one for the ages in fact, and he even uses Garden of Eden imagery to frame his dilemma (which, one might add, is highly reminiscent of the first chapter of Dorothy…
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Another Week Ends: Wiman’s Abyss, Opinionless Boyfriends, Compassionology, Lehrergate, Antinomianism, Revolution, Taylor Swift, and Wreck-It Ralph
1. Every once and a while something comes across your screen that is so beautiful and honest and profound and enlivening that you want to force others to watch it. If commands of this kind worked, that’s what I’d do here. I’m referring to the interview that Bill Moyers conducted with poet (and Poetry Magazine editor) Christian Wiman this past February. Much like the essay of Wiman’s we featured last week, this is gut level stuff; he touches on pretty much everything that’s important. Or I should day, nothing that he touches on isn’t important: love, marriage, cancer, beauty, poetry,…
Food Is Everything? Serving Salvation on a Silver Platter
An incredible column appeared in The NY Times recently, “A Matter of Taste?”, in which William Deresiewicz observed the religious characteristics inherent in the ascendency of “foodie” culture. Cuisine has always been a personal and ethnic identity marker of course, but in the last twenty or so odd years, what we eat/cook has become a much more powerful and widespread barometer of personal sophistication and merit. A cultural law of undeniable potency, in other words, with chefs serving as high priests of taste, in both senses of that word. No wonder that so many (excellent) cooking shows have emerged on…
Another Week Ends: Philip K. Dick, Pinterest Slogans, Online Rudeness, Tiger Mothers, Bill Fay, Mumford Backlash, Louis CK, and Kramer Grace
1. A breath-taking appreciation of late sci-fi author and savant Philip K. Dick that will make you want to go out and read all the man’s work immediately and/or join the colorfully named ranks of his fans (one guess). Dick’s Christianity even gets a mention, ht CR:
[Author] Jonathan Lethem notes how often, within their flawed and fallen worlds, Dick allowed his characters moments of humane grace. “There are a couple of his books that end with this uncanny expression of sudden, absurd, human connection of love — against the odds of which the entire book may seem to have been stacked.”…
Debilitating Anxiety and The Great American Search for Happiness
A little collaboration with DZ:
The Opinionator‘s Anxiety series continues to impress! Its most recent installment, “America the Anxious” by Ruth Whippman, is a Brit’s perspective on the American fixation on happiness, or at least, happiness-language. As a jumping off point, Whippman talks about the palpable differences between the Facebook feeds of her friends on either side of the Atlantic. While her British friends are often dismissively even-keel about their daily lives, her American friends are perpetually fitting the narrative of their days into the rubric of (capital H) Happiness.
Whippman goes on to frame Happiness as America’s Greatest Commandment, the declarative…
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Another Week Ends: Crimson Despair, Teacher Expectations, MJ’s Bad, Improvement Narratives, Neil Young, Neurospeculation, The Master, and Conf Update
1. An incredibly moving account of “Depression and Despair at Harvard” in response to the suicide of a classmate by Jordan Monge on The Harvard Ichthus. With real vulnerability, Monge touches on the crushing power of expectation, the vicious circle of shame and fear, the grace of defeat, even the toxic and tragic way Christians revert to the Law, post-conversion. It’s a courageous testament to the reality that we are not saved us from pain, but in and through it, ht AZ:
via indexed.com
Admitting my weakness feels like admitting that I am not good enough to bear my own name….
Where’s the Audience? Narcissism, Affirmation and the Freedom to Wear a Sombrero
A beautiful new installment of The NY Times’ series on Anxiety appeared this past weekend, “On Being Nothing” by Brian Jay Stanley. It’s a personal reflection on a universal reality: our undying need for affirmation from other people. Whether it be praise in the workplace, mail in the inbox, the right hand to hold, fans in the bleachers (or cyberspace), we seem to be hardwired to require, or at least yearn for, external approval. Stanley describes the process of growing up in very sympathetic terms, namely, as the process by which the inborn view of ourselves as the center of…
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Another Week Ends: Incarnational Kerouac, Lutheran Austerity, Dream Identities, Rev, Arrested Development, Mormon Sci Fi, Foodie Piety and Daytrotter
1. Newsweek published an excerpt of D.T. Max’s forthcoming Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and what an excerpt! It concerns Wallace’s relationship with Mary Karr, and the genus of Infinite Jest. Almost enough to dispel the reservations we voiced earlier this week. It also makes for a great lead-in to another literary find, the blog for The Library of America’ amazing interview with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, the editor of the forthcoming Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems. Asked why she thinks Kerouac’s poems still speak to us, she gave the following (jaw-dropping) answer, which gets…
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